PAIN WRITERS: GUIDELINES FOR A PAINFUL STORY

Pain writers draw inspiration from two sources:

Their own pain.

Someone else’s pain.

The source of pain is a standard feature.

Pain writers want you to feel it.

For example:

With the side effects of chemo and radiation, you will never be 100% again because your immune system is weak. Ruins marriages, families and relationships with friends. Because you’re not the same again after cancer and treatments.

This is painful to read. Whether first hand experience, or from the witness to pain side, it hurts.

“You’ll never be 100% again?”

If it’s said by a cancer person, there’s an added scoop of shame.

This person is either consumed by their pathology and spiraling down, throwing a last few warnings to others on the way out, or they’ve been reading too many case studies of the debilitating effects of the chemo-radiation combo.

In general, when you sign up for cancer treatment you meet people who are complete strangers to you. Until then. Then they are your new best friends. At first you don’t know them, they don’t know you, but you share one thing in common: killing cancer.

Note to the sidelines: Cancer dies hard and wants to take you with it.

No doctor, nurse, tech, or therapist is qualified to tell you you’ll never be 100% after harsh cancer treatment. Why? Because they’re strangers with no idea of what 100% means to you.

Instead, they’ve got test results used to dial up the chemo and radiation hot enough to do the cancer killing job 100%.

One person’s return to 100% might be feeling good enough to sit on a couch, watch TV, and eat.

Whether that was their previous 100% or not, after going through the oven of treatment, sitting on a couch and feeling good enough to eat is a worthy goal.

But There’s More

In the hardest moments you know who your real friends are or who the people are who appreciate you.

Everyone has an idea of what a hardest cancer moment is. If you find yourself pondering the difference between ‘real friends’ and ‘Facebook friends’ you haven’t reached that moment.

If you’ve been reduced to nutritional intake from protein drinks and shakes because you can’t swallow, suffered a dramatic weight loss, and your guts churn at the smell of food; if you’ve had an intervention that ends with the choices of a hospital stay, nursing home, or snapping the fuck out it, you’re close.

When you vomit from taking anti-nausea drugs and drop a pellet-crap that looks like something found at a deer park, and turning all the colors of yellow, green, and purple, you’re close.

Combine all that with a doctor’s opinion that you’ll go into kidney failure and end up on dialysis if you don’t make an effort to swallow liquids, you’re even closer.

At the hardest moments, Dear Readers, returning to 100% of who you were, while trying to decide who your real friends are, is not a top priority.

What is a top priority is getting away from the idea that dying is a better option than what you’ve got going at the hardest moments, the nadir, hitting the bottom and you can’t get up so ‘TAKE ME NOW.’

Find A Way To Turn The Damn Corner

I have decided to publish this post in support of close family, friends and relatives who have fought this horrible disease.

This is not that post in support of family, friends, and relatives. I have decided to write this post in support of the doctors, nursers, techs, and staff who do the cancer fighting, not the patient.

But I’m not leaving them out, because without patients, there would be no fight. Just death, and lots of it.

How much death? A bad cancer year takes out over a half million people of an estimated two million new cases.

Let the doctors to the fighting? What do you do? What do pain writers do?

Stay out or the way and support them to your support people. Keep a positive mental attitude of trust that the professionals on the job know what they’re doing and they do it with your best interests in mind.

Part of the proper attitude is avoiding a chemo doctor from a private infusion clinic who prescribes three individual chemo-therapy drugs along with a chemo-pump to keep the chemo levels high 24/7.

More chemo, please?

Second Opinion Fight Time

Instead, sign up with an OHSU infusion clinic run by an up to date doctor who prescribes one chemo and no pump. The Knight Cancer Institute doctor says his notes on the case point to the treatment he prescribes and calls the other prescription for loads of chemo “A difference of opinion.”

They didn’t call it Mal Practice, Death Sentence, or Money Grab From Desperate Uninformed Cancer Victims, but you can.

Now I’m focusing on those who take the time to read this post to the end … a little test, just to see who reads and who shares without reading. Cancer is a very aggressive and destructive enemy of our bodies. Even after treatment, the body is devastated. It’s a very long process.

No matter how you read the above, or when, it is downer bullshit no cancer patient needs to see or hear.

These are people tested to their wits’ end and living with the unknown: will live or die before treatment begins? Then they’ll feel like they’re dying before turning the corner for the climb back.

If harsh words of doom sound like the sort of information dispersed before some quacky medical recommendations right out of the alternative covid cure playbook, well . . .?

Here’s the wind-up and here’s the pitch for bleach, light therapy, and horse medicine topped with a urine cocktail.

I would like to know who I can count on and who takes the time to read this. When you have finished this, write “Done” in the comments.

Keep in mind, cancer doesn’t care about your friends, Facebook friends, their medical advice, or yours. All cancer wants to do is grow, grow bigger, and grow some more. That shit doesn’t go away on it’s own, but the patient will if they don’t let the cancer fighters take the gloves off and beat is hitching-hiking ass into the ditch.

The Fire Treatment For Pain Writers

Curing cancer is a wish, a dream, a hope, a belief. As a result, some cancer gets cured. Wishes, dreams, and beliefs are part of the process on the patient side.

The medical side uses a flame thrower to burn it out.

Chemo goes after the fastest reproducing cells, the cancer cells, and takes other cells with it. It’s a roast-fest the burns, burns, burns, and if you can’t eat enough to keep your weight up, it burns you too.

Lose too much weight during chemo and you’re out of the program. It has to stop because chemo will take you out faster than cancer if not monitored correctly.

Radiation is just what it sounds like. Try not to think of a micro-wave oven while you get strapped and locked onto a radiation table and everyone leaves the room and closes the foot and a half thick door behind them, leaving you alone with your thoughts.

Instead, hope, dream, and believe that the movement and sounds in the radiation room are happening to save your life, whether you come back 100%, 75%, 50%.

You’re hoping a rouge power surge doesn’t trip into the machinery and fry you in half; You’re dreaming of getting through the next few minutes and leaving without a meltdown.

Most of all, you believe that centuries of medial practice on humans by humans was done specifically to guide you to better health and fitness.

Science Is Reassuring To Pain Writers

If the following is reassuring trust and faith, I don’t see it, but if you do, tell me how.

Sadly, cancer is still the illness of the century. Please, in honour of someone who died, or who is battling cancer. Everyone says, “If you need anything, don’t hesitate: I’ll be there for you.“ So I’m going to make a bet, without being pessimistic: I know my family and friends will put it on their wall.

Instead of family and friends, I aim for the stranger because we’re all strangers among strangers with cancer. Things change. You get funny, they get funny, everybody gets funny.

Try and change for the better by insisting to yourself that you’ll work to get back to 100% of who you used to be, and leave the door open for a 110% return.

You just have to copy (not share)!!! It’s awareness month for this disease. I did it for someone very very special! We all know someone who stood before us, and who has fought or who is fighting this battle as well as even those we have lost.

#CancerAwarenessMonth

While this is cancer awareness, the same rules apply to covid awareness. Be alert, be safe. It’s not like I’ve got too many readers and can lose even one.

Who else doesn’t want to lose anyone? Your friends and family, so do it for them and you. Don’t turn them all into pain writers. Get vaccinated and wear a mask.